


I Don't Get Paid Enough To Deal With Body Swaps

by lyssajanet



Series: OC Romance Week [3]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Body Swap, F/M, OC Romance Week, Role Swap / Body Swap, it's elder scrolls guys people get shot with arrows, mention of violence, thats just the prompt tag its only body swap sorry guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 00:30:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19366654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyssajanet/pseuds/lyssajanet
Summary: When a strange spell causes dragonborn Velanna and her crush Auryen Morellus to somehow switch bodies, it's up to Velanna's followers Kashia al-Sentinel and Gael to deal with getting the soft spoken museum curator out of the woods and reunited with his body. Kashia might work as a bodyguard and follower for Velanna for free, but she did not sign up for this particular duty, nor does she know anything about how to reverse it.





	I Don't Get Paid Enough To Deal With Body Swaps

**Author's Note:**

> i spent more time worrying about if they used mr. and mrs. and miss in TES than i did worrying about the plot. i clearly have my priorities in order. also im a day late for this prompt but work... hard.

When Kashia al-Sentinel first arrived in Skyrim, she hadn’t planned on finding the dragonborn. She hadn’t planned on the dragonborn being an Altmer mage with the upper body strength of a ferret, a relic hunter with next to no self-preservation when within eyesight of a crypt’s treasure, or on the run from the Thalmor for dissent. But all of those things were ones that Kashia could deal with as a Blade. It was her being a friend that made her able to deal with her dragonborn’s massive crush on her business partner, and the fake marriage agreement that soon followed.

Kashia had tried. By Akatosh did she try to get Velanna to admit her love for Auryen. Watching the two of them tip toe around their feelings, blushing whenever the other paid them a compliment or even stood too close, the longing gazes, Velanna sighing that there was no way that Auryen felt the same way. He clearly must be just tolerating her as a business partner and spent every moment regretting his impulsive decision to tell the Thalmor they were married to keep her from being taken. Kashia loved Velanna dearly as a friend, but there were sometimes she wondered if the world really needed a dragonborn right now, so she could throttle Velanna. Gael was no help either, refusing to do anything else for the team besides shoot stuff with his bow and make the best campfire made meals of the whole team.

But Velanna made her promise, swear by her ancestors not to tell Auryen anything about how she felt. It was not an easy promise to make, especially when she knew that it would be better in the end for her and Auryen to just kiss already dammit. But Velanna had such little agency in the past and so few friends in the now, that betraying her trust, even for her own good, would ruin everything the two women had built over the last few months.

That didn’t stop Kashia from trying to get the two of them alone all the time. And staying away from Auryen herself let her remain willfully ignorant as to his own true feelings, and convince herself that all the evidence she had that he felt the same was unconfirmed.

But even the best plans can fall apart when funky magic gets involved.

The team had been clearing out a bandit cave the day before, slashing baddies, shooting beasts, and incinerating mages. It wasn’t uncommon for one of them to take a strange spell to the chest and not be sure what its intended purpose was. So there was no need to see if anything was wrong with Velanna when pink light came from the boss of the bandit group’s hand and went straight for her chest, knocking the dragonborn down for a moment while Kashia decapitated the bastard and Gael landed three arrows in rapid succession into her chest and neck. Velanna got up after a few moments, said she was fine, and they moved onto looting.

That was the evening. Then they all made camp and pitched their tents for sleep while Gael prepared some deer from the afternoon. They ate, planned where to go in the morning, and crawled into their bedrolls. No one kept watch, as Velanna had more than mastered alarm wards in her years of dungeon delving for historical societies. When the morning came and Kashia awoke, she and Gael sat around the fire and let Velanna take her time getting up. Kashia never slept well on the road with Velanna, too worried about them being ambushed and preferring to keep their savior safe inside her home or an inn. Taking the beast blood definitely didn’t help.

Despite all that, there was rarely a day when she awoke before Gael, but Kashia was convinced he didn’t actually sleep. She wondered if demiprinces actually needed to perform any of the required tasks of keeping a mortal body alive and well, or if he just went through the actions for the sake of mimicking mortals. He probably just sat in his tent in complete silence, unmoving, until he could see the sun rise over the horizon and would then leave the tent. That morning was no exception, as once again Gael was up, aware, and ready to leave whenever the other two were ready.

Kashia was always amazed at how well Velanna slept regardless of where they were or the danger around them. She supposed that her years of adventuring must have desensitized her to danger, deciding that there was no need to keep adrenaline pumping at all hours and risk not being well rested for the next day of risking her life for ancient relics of dead civilizations. Adrenaline was only necessary for when the threat was close enough to see the whites of their eyes, and Velanna had mastered that kind of control. So rather than make her suffer for the other’s inability to sleep for long, they let her rest until it became unreasonable.

About when the other two were packing up and about to wake Velanna, they heard shuffling from her tent. But rather than the usual shuffle of slowly getting dressed and leaving her tent, it was quicker, and when she left the tent, she practically threw open the flap. Eyes wide and body stiff, looking around the area for… something. It was only a few moments before her eyes found Kashia and Gael and her shoulders relaxed slightly, but that was all it took to see there was something off. If Kashia didn’t learn how Velanna held herself in the last few months of traveling together, how her face moved with specific emotions, the intonation of her words, then she would have been a terrible body guard. This wasn’t like Velanna at all.

“Ah, good. You’re here miss al-Sentinel,” said ‘Velanna’, presumably.

Velanna would never call her that, nor would she be pleasantly surprised to see Kashia in their camp after they all went to sleep in that same camp the night before. This wasn’t Velanna, but at least whoever it was wasn’t trying to pretend to _be_ Velanna. Body snatchers were the worst. But this person clearly knew Kashia, so it wasn’t a stranger.

Kashia still felt her brow furrow as she tried to figure out what was going on. When she sensed Gael attempting to step toward ‘Velanna’, she put out an arm to stop him. “Yeah, we all went to sleep here in camp last night. We weren’t just going to leave without you.” Regardless of their failed attempt at impersonating Velanna, she wanted them to admit it first, not her.

‘Velanna’ finished getting out of the tent, still in her sleep clothes, and Kashia’s suspicions continued to be confirmed just in the way she walked. “Yes well I’m afraid to say that this is not where I went to sleep last night, nor is this my own body.”

“And just where did you go to sleep and whose body to you normally… inhabit?”

‘Velanna’ clenched her teeth in an awkward smile that seemed almost alien on her face. “My desk in the Museum of the Dragonborn, and I typically inhabit my own body – of Auryen Morellus. Inhabiting the bodies of others is a first however. I’m not particularly sure how I got here.”

Within her head, Kashia felt a spiritual face palm. Of course of all people, it had to be Auryen. Akatosh didn’t seem one to play fair, but this seemed practically trickster. She tried to think of any known instances of people exchanging consciousnesses (if an exchange had actually happened like she thought and Velanna was currently panicking in the museum), what caused them, and how they ended up getting fixed. Then she remembered the pink light.

Kashia sighed deeply. “I have my suspicions, but I can’t be sure. Velanna got hit with some kind of spell while we were clearing a bandit den, but there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her so we moved on.”

“Do you know anything about it? The spell, that is.” Auryen asked with Velanna’s voice, jarring Kashia more with every word.

She shook her head. “Nope. Magic’s not my thing, or Gael’s really. Despite… you know.” She didn’t actually know, and only realized that outing an unknown demiprince to a history buff might not be a good idea halfway through saying it. She glanced over at Gael, and he had the sense to at least look confused. She whispered out the corner of her mouth to him, “Anything?”

“No,” he responded at normal volume.

Auryen was silent for a moment in thought, and Kashia could really see his mannerisms come out. His face when he was thinking especially hard, the angle of his shoulders, how he supported his weight. Such simple stuff that only looked out of place when being performed by another body. Then, he clasped his hands and spoke. “Well. I believe the next best thing for all of us to do is get back to the museum and find Velanna. It will be easier to reverse the effects of this spell when we can study it in a safe location with both of the affected nearby.”

It was easy to forget how much of a leader Auryen was, only interacting with him in the museum while doing his curator duties and at excavations where all the work happened when they weren’t there. It was easy to forget that he got that entire museum set up by himself, and that he led the team through all that setup while Velanna and the others took their merry time getting to the site. There was a lot about Auryen that Kashia didn’t know as well, including much about his past before arriving in Skyrim.

She and Gael agreed with Auryen’s plan, and they showed Auryen how to pack up Velanna’s tent and where she kept her belongings. Knowing how dangerous the roads of Skyrim could be, and the fact they were at least two days from Solitude, Auryen would need to change out of Velanna’s sleep clothes so a stray bandit’s arrow wouldn’t instantly kill him. His face turned red when he looked at the bag, and frantically promised to not look at anything before awkwardly stepping into her tent to change. Kashia at least appreciated that he was considerate enough to not sneak a peek, but felt that throttling desire again with that extra confirmation that Auryen and Velanna would be perfect together if they would just _confess_.

And so the team of two and one went off down the road and made their way to Solitude in relative silence, only having to fight off a few groups of unsavory folk and more than a few examples of Skyrim’s wonderful fauna. As long as the daedra count was limited to a conjuration and Gael, it was a good day in Kashia’s book. And the less she had to talk to Auryen and risk getting to know him, the easier it was to stay only somewhat involved in his and Velanna’s relationship.

He asked them questions though. But it was mostly Kashia who answered, since Gael had to maintain his cold and stoic persona at all costs or else he’d die or something. Mostly his questions were about their daily routine and if this was really what they did every day. She said that traveling was all they did really, spending a maximum of two nights in a city before getting back on the road and into some cave, crypt, or ruin. It became apparent that while Auryen was well traveled and knew how to defend himself in ruins, he had never had the experience of exploring the land with only a sword and your wits, making just barely enough money doing odd jobs and selling junk each day to rent a room for the night and pay the pretty innkeeper for a bowl of soup. That he never traversed the land on foot and fought off every thief, bandit, and bear that decided you were their next victim. She wondered what effect this would have on him.

By the time the sun set, they knew they couldn’t make it to Solitude without passing out first, and so they managed to make it to Morthal’s inn for the night, hoping to continue at dawn. Kashia made sure Auryen had the nicer room, while she and Gael slept wherever they could.

But before Kashia even awoke, Auryen came bursting into her room and shook her shoulder.

“Kash, Kash, Kash wake up!” Kashia opened her eyes. That was not Auryen.

“Velanna?” she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes while her brain started to understand what had happened.

Velanna – definitely Velanna now – nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s me. I’m back in my own body now. I ended up somehow in Auryen’s body at the museum,” she explained, not knowing that Kashia already knew (or at least suspected) what had happened. “But then I woke up today in my own body again!”

Kashia sat up and pulled Velanna in for a tight hug, shaking her from side to side. “Oooh I’m so glad you’re back, and safe!” After about a second, Kashia felt Velanna relax into the hug. It had taken a while for the Altmer to get used to her friend’s signs of affection. “Thank Akatosh this all worked out on its own and we didn’t have to bring Auryen in your body back to the museum to try and figure this shit out.”

Then she felt Velanna stiffen up again and pull back from the hug, placing her hands on Kashia’s shoulders and looking at her wide eyed. “Wait, Auryen was in my body as well?” she asked, voice tinted with nerves.

“Yes,” Kashia stated, seemingly obvious.

“And you didn’t – I mean – you know. Say,” she swallowed quickly, “anything?”

Kashia sighed in minor exasperation. Of course the second she found out Auryen and Kashia were alone, all concerns, even about cause-unknown body swapping, were unimportant. “No, Velanna. No one said anything. Auryen was a perfect gentleman and no one talked about your massive crush on him. I promise.”

She watched the weight drop from Velanna’s shoulders. “Oh, thank you. I guess.”

A beat of silence. Then, “Now what?” Kashia asked.

Velanna bit her lip – a look of concentration that finally looked more in place on Velanna’s face than any of Auryen’s had over the last time. “I guess we go back to the museum to see if there’s any residual effects. I want to study that spell and see what it’s made of, what makes it do what it did. Like how did it make Auryen and I switch bodies? Why us? Why overnight and not instantly? Why did it switch back after a day? Is it daedric? What school of magic does it fall–”

And that was the true sign that Velanna was back.

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @ partyatsanguines, sorry again icecreamassassin


End file.
